When I was in elementary school, there were two things (among many) that were very important to me. One was a publication that we received in school called, “My Weekly Reader”. The little magazine had stories, news, games, etc., and, obviously we received it every week. The other thing that was very important to me was the Scholastic Book Club, an annual book fair where we could order books that would be delivered to us in our class. I believe that the Scholastic Book Club is where my lifelong bibliomania was first nurtured. Three children’s books, featured in “My Weekly Reader” and obtained through the Scholastic Book Club, stand out in a long line of literary masterpieces. The first was a book called The Lion’s Paw, by a fellow named Robb White. It was the story of two children who escaped from an orphanage and an adventure they had looking for a treasure, in this case their missing father. Another book was called, Ghost Town Treasure, by Clyde Robert Bulla. You get the gist of that. Finally there was the greatest book I read as a child and one I have reread every year since the second grade, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg. It is about two children who run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they discover a mystery and a treasure (surprise!). At home my mother encouraged daily reading (extensive daily reading). My father was not a reader, at least not a fiction or pleasure reader. He read files from work and I think, when he finished with his business at the close of the day, there was little time for any other reading. My father, a very quiet man had other qualities. One distinct thing I remember about my dad during this time of year is how much he loved the Christmas tree. Every year he was wild about getting one, lighting it, decorating it. Very often, when it was all done, he would just sit in the dark during the Christmas season and stare at the lighted tree. There was something very endearing about a man with such serious responsibilities and yet such a child-like heart. Maybe that’s the story of Christmas. Maybe that is our goal every day. After my father died in 1980, my mother was never too keen on Christmas trees again. This year was the first time in about 20 years that I put up a little tree in my room. Father Julian donated the tree. The decorations came from Walmart. The lights are few. A seminarian donated one ornament which is beautiful. Often in the evenings I sit in the dark and look at the tree and think about my dad.
Perhaps this is the time of year to think about the past, to reminisce. We do not live in the past. We cannot, but as William Faulkner once famously said, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. All of us are the products of our memories, what we have read, what we have experienced certainly. But none of us is reducible to our past. There is always the horizon, the sunrise, the bright morning sky which invades our minds and hearts and offers us promise. In ministry we constantly come up against folks whose lives have been so damaged by what has happened to them, as children or as adults, that it does not seem possible for them to be anything other than “that”. Some of us come from broken homes. Some of us have experienced abuse of various kinds. Some of us have done things that we are ashamed of. Some of us have been good children, but we never felt good about ourselves. Some of us have erred and we cannot get over that waywardness. God doesn’t concern himself with what we have done. He invites us to move on. All of us are damaged goods, but can we find a way to acknowledge the damage, and still focus on the good, or perhaps more perversely to see the damage as part of what has made me, even made me good?. If only we could focus more on the good.
Today we are invited to come to Bethlehem. Seemingly, there was nothing there but crowds, confusion and a mess. People were filling the inns. Folks must have been pushing and shoving. And into the midst of this chaos comes the Lord. No matter how we try to sanitize it, there is nothing ideal about Jesus’ birth. Born in a stable, born to poor folks, born without any authority. Yet, there he is. He is a treasure. That little baby comes today to bring us joy, joy that will only be fully realized at Golgotha and in the garden on Easter. Jesus did not have an ideal birth, but he made the world ideal through that wretched birth. We do not have ideal lives but God gives us what we need to make our lives and the lives of others more manageable, even wonderful. In the deepest part of our hearts we know that. We know it through the pain. We know it through the ugliness and bitterness. We know it through the doubt. We know it. We know, no matter how much suffering we must endure that God made us for joy. My brothers and sisters, I wish you so much joy in this Christmas season, but more than that, I wish you joy in the coming year, in the good times and the bad.
And even more than wishing you joy, I hope you realize the joy. There is so much bitterness, so much resentment, so much sourness, so much pain, so much ugliness, so much horror in the world. Can’t we be beacons of light for one another to illuminate the dark places in our world, in our souls? Can we take the cheer of this day, a cheer, a blessing shining through the poverty of the crib and make it our own?
In the coming year I am dedicating some time to write this weekly column in addition to rector’s conferences and weekly contributions to the Raven. I hope to make this column a little like “My Weekly Reader”. There is more to come in the New Year, but in the meantime, be filled with His love as we celebrate the Lord’s birth, his continual coming among us.
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Amen, I say to you,
I received a Christmas card the other day. On the front was a reproduction of a painting by Raphael from the Louvre, the Madonna and Child with St. John.
among those born of women
there has been none greater than John the Baptist;
yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
I had a little laugh, because I am always intrigued when I survey images of St. John the Baptist, in particular Renaissance paintings, and finding in them the baby John, dressed in his camel hair and carrying his little staff. That camel hair must have been rough on his baby skin.
The images are important, however, because they show us something critical about John and his mission. They show us that, from his earliest days, he was born for something. He had a purpose. This is certainly an important theme in the Gospel of St. Matthew that we have today:
Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;he will prepare your way before you.
And prepare the way he did. But there is a problem, a problem that rears its ugly head today, as we are caught in the quagmire of preparations for Christmas on the one hand, and the desire to be authentic to our Christian calling on the other. It is the problem of the need for order. Our desire for control.
We love control; we crave order.
Order and control let us in on what’s what, who’s in, who’s out, where we should be, when we should x and when we should y, what others are doing or should be doing. We think we know John, but do we? We think we understand God, but do we?
Control helps us to put the world into boxes – neat, labeled boxes that organize our aimless existences into the genus and species of neatly arranged specimens of life. John is here and Jesus is here and God is here and I am here.
Order gives us power by enabling us to predict and maintain.
Control gives us the authority to shut others out or welcome them in. according to our neatly perceived categories.
Here is your God,
Control, or at least our version of order and control, ultimately makes us omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, gods. And our deification would undoubtedly be complete …
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
the ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing.
If only life were simpler.
If only there was a rule.
If only a formula could be maintained.
If only everything was more, I don’t know, Christmassy.
But we know, we know don’t we, that while there are categories, corollaries, catchphrases, there is also confusion, a little bedlam, a touch of anarchy at Christmas and, really, every day.
I’m not talking here about the crowds at Wal-Mart or the mall.
I’m not talking about the host of parties and events we will have to attend in the coming days.
I’m not talking about the endless round of liturgies we have to sing in the next couple of weeks.
I’m talking about Biblical anarchy.
Anarchy that looks like fumbling for words as you hastily turn the pages of the ritual book, looking for something to say to the young woman who is dying of cancer in the bed in front of you while her husband and 5-year-old son look on helplessly. Hopelessly.
Anarchy that looks like randomness in the up-and-down quarks of our quantum imaginations, a universe that propels itself ever onward, helplessly, hopelessly.
Anarchy that feels like the trickle of cold water down your spine, the cold water of recognition as you face the same temptation again and again, that secret part of yourself that simply cannot go away, but cannot be ignored.
After 40 years, it continues to rise up in you like flood waters and the chill of shame, known all too well for all too long, makes you wonder helplessly, hopelessly, if there ever will be, ever can be forgiveness, like those wandering aimlessly in the desert.
What did you come out here to see?
Anarchy that works like a vice of guilt and pain inflicting old memories, incising old wounds, igniting old flames that will never die, that cannot be fixed, cannot be controlled, leaving our family members, our fellow monks, our friends wandering helplessly, hopelessly toward Babylon, Babel, bedlam. John knew it.
How foolish I was to think that it could all be fixed, all of this anarchy could be repaired if I just had the right words, the right prescription, the right answer, the right box or the right Christmas gift.
And in the midst of this anarchy comes John, not announcing himself, but announcing the coming of the Lord, his first coming, his second coming, his continual coming and, suddenly, in our inmost beings, we realize that the Lord hears the cry of the poor, and we are the poor.
And in this stance, we are reminded of one thing, one supremely important thing: God is the only one in control of the mess.
God is in control of all our irrational fears, all our desperate unknowns, all our duplicitous discernments, all our tumultuous turmoil.
God is in control of everything in our lives, our hurts and pains, our inclinations, our habits, our addictions and our healing.
God is in control of our health, our well-being, our sanity, our sanctity.
God is in control of our breath, our beating hearts, our generating minds.
God is in control because God is in the anarchy; our anarchy is his control.
Our lawlessness is his benevolence.
Our bewilderment, his wisdom.
So rejoice in the Lord, Gaudete.
Rejoice, meaning is coming.
Rejoice, chairos and chromos are converging.
Rejoice, the wilderness is transforming.
Rejoice, the snow is melting.
Rejoice, because our sin is God’s opportunity, the opportunity to tell us that we cannot control everything, that we depend upon Him, His power, His goodness, His mercy, And that, Charlie Brown, is the meaning of Christmas.
That is what we call mystery. Today, every day we gather here, we stand before a great mystery, the mystery of God’s involvement with our world.
We like to control it, this mystery, what happens here. We certainly have our laws, our tastes, our stylistic sensibilities. We have liturgists, theologians, ministers. We have the rules and we have the desire to make those rules stick. We seem ultimately to be in control, until anarchy breaks in and, standing with impunity before God and every person here, the priest holds up what in every ordered environment would seem to be mere bread, common wine and say:
Behold the Lamb of God (John’s words). Behold him who takes away the sins of the world, blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.
Then, God’s anarchy breaks out, our control is lost, we are seized and possessed by the Body of Christ and we are God’s chosen ones, blessed indeed. And only in the anarchic aftermath of the mysterium fidei, our Christmas cheer, can we truly say, truly know that:
the blind regain their sight,
the lame walk,
lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead are raised,
and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.
Or perhaps more significantly, we know this:
Among those born of women, there has been none greater than John the Baptist.
And yet, the least in the Kingdom of God (that is us) is greater than he, precisely because we have lost control. -
I have been thinking about this homily for weeks.
What to do and how to do it.
There is a very sophisticated theological theme running through this feast.
Starting with the primordial ooze. After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree ….
The past is compelling so …
I looked back at some homilies from the past.
They had a lot of gravitas in them. They were very serious, beautiful and serious.
I thought about taking a homily from the past and reworking it. That would be alright, wouldn’t it?
The annunciation, Hail full of grace, very compelling. I kept looking back but nothing would congeal, nothing was coming to me. And then, Eureka!
St. Paul:
In him we were also chosen,
About Our Lady, true enough, but something else came to mind.
destined in accord with the purpose of the One
who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will,
so that we might exist for the praise of his glory,
we who first hoped in Christ.
Two weekends ago, I went to Minnesota. It was cold. There was snow on the ground. I gave a parish mission in a place called Ely, way up there at the parish of a friend of mine and an alumnus, Fr. Seth Gogolin.
It was not the end of the earth, but you could see it from there.
At the end of the mission day, there was to be two hours of hearing confessions. The first hour was very busy, thanks be to God. The second hour, not so much.
I sat in the confessional. I finished Vespers. I completed Compline. There wasn’t anything left to do. Until I found THE BOOK.
It was simply resting by the chair in the confessional, so I presume the pastor had been reading it during some reconciliation down time.
It was a profound book. An amazing book. For me, a bit of a life-changing book.
I have it here. I didn’t steal that one. I ordered a new one on Amazon.com
It is called: The Donkey That No One Could Ride. By Anthony DeStefano.
It didn’t take me long to read it. It took me even less time to realize that this is a very important work of literature and theology.
The book is about a donkey, obviously,who is so puny and so weak that no one can ride him.
Let me summarize for you:
There is this donkey, you see. He was weak and good for nothing.
Let me read it for you (it won’t take very long).
There once was a donkey/ so weak and small/So weak he could carry nothing at all/ even when children sat on his hide/ he’d wobble and tumble and fall on his side/ No matter how much he tried or he cried/ He was the donkey that no one could ride.
Okay, it’s not Tennyson, but you get the picture. Now this little piece of theological literature is also a parable of sorts.
Who are we?
Are we the children who are disappointed at the donkey’s inabilities?
Are we the rich men whom the donkey could not bear?
Are we the cartmen whom the donkey could not accommodate?
These characters are all in the book, so trust me. Are we these characters?
Perhaps, but like a good parable, I think we have to settle on the fact that we are the donkey.
We are small.
We are weak.
We are useless, at least as the world deems usefulness.
Perhaps we hear with our little friend the voice of the world speaking to us.
Go away from here donkey
Go away and just hide.
What use is a donkey that no one can ride?
That’s us. We are the donkey. Jackasses, that is what we are.
We are given the promise, which we choose to ignore.
We are given hope, but our solipsism changes it into despair.
We are given community and we choose to isolate ourselves.
We are given a vocation and we absolutely try to convince ourselves that God is not calling, God is not concerned, God doesn’t care.
And we find ourselves, or we pretend to find ourselves, unfit. But it is not true.
God finds us worthy.
God wants us.
God is choosing us in Him to bring about His plan, just as He chose that little donkey long ago.
This all came to me sitting in a confessional at the end of the earth. Ironically, in a confessional.
That is the story of Adam and Eve, choosing their wills to the point of uselessness. Overcome by the intoxicating fruit of the tree.
That is the story of the human race since the apple core hit the bushes, downtrodden, useless, hurting and yet full of pride.
We are the world’s jackasses and, without some assistance, the very assistance we celebrate in today’s esoteric feast, without assistance we are lost.
Then we hear again the words of St. Paul:
In him we were also chosen,
In The Donkey That No One Could Ride, the little one meets a fellow named Jesus. Jesus chooses the donkey. Jesus accomplishes what needs to be accomplished. The donkey hopes in Christand Jesus says these words to the little jackass:
destined in accord with the purpose of the One
who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will,
so that we might exist for the praise of his glory,
we who first hoped in Christ.
My help is enough
Do we, do we have the faith that the miracle accomplished through Mary, in Mary, can be the miracle accomplished in the little jackasses gathered here today?
It’s all that you need
It’s all you require in life to succeed
The weaker you are
The more strength I give
I’ll be there to help you
As long as you live
I know you feel tired and frightened and broken
But do you believe
These words I have spoken?
Do you believe – I ask you again
Do you have faith I can heal you my friend?
Do we accept the healing of our puniness, our scrawniness, that comes from God, that comes through Christ, that comes in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary?
Of course, our lives are predicated on more than a little book about a stupid donkey.
They are predicated on weakness, weakness that becomes strength by reliance on the will of God.
They are predicated on poverty, poverty that becomes wealth by finding within our impoverished condition that store of wealth that is His grace.
They are predicated on love, a love that breaks our backs to serve, to serve without ever counting the cost, as long as we live.
We feel tired and frightened and broken. But God provides.
We were weak. He is our strength.
We were hopeless. He is our hope.
In him we were also chosen,
destined in accord with the purpose of the One
who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will,
so that we might exist for the praise of his glory,
we who first hoped in Christ.
We were starving and He has become our bread, our inebriating wine.
They are predicated on the satisfaction of nourishment received here at this altar.
The Bread of Life, the Chalice of Salvation,
Food for the journey for jackasses on the way to something, on the way to Jerusalem, to someplace … beyond?
The donkey that no one could ride took Jesus to Jerusalem. It wasn’t the donkey’s last journey. Neither was it the last journey of Christ, or of us. -
I have recentlybeen talking about a book that has been generating a little bit of controversy. The title of the book is Rebuiltby Michael White and Tom Corcoran. The book is all about what is currently happening in the Church: the reorganization of parishes, the relationships that exist ministerially between the priest and other Church ministers, and of course, the new evangelization.
The book begins by challenging what the authors consider a consumerist model of parish life. By this, they mean that, in our culture, there is a sense that the parish provides services for the use and, indeed, the convenience of parishioners. That is the reason we have thousands of “underused” churches in this country. That is the reason that many presbyterates are strapped for personnel because the proliferation of Masses is overwhelming. That is the reason there are few resources made available in many places for the largest population of Catholics in this country, Hispanic Catholics. The list can go on and on.
What Rebuilt proposes is that evangelization is a process that must begin at home. We must be renewed if the Church is to be renewed. We must be evangelized if we are successful evangelists for the world. There is a decided internal evangelization that needs to precede the evangelization of others. What the book proposes is this radical idea: The “lost” may very well be the folks who are showing up in our parishes every week but have yet to hear the penetrating message of the Gospel. They are “consumer Catholics.” Now, I do not believe everything that is presented in Rebulit will be helpful, but I do think it gives the Church in the U.S. today some serious food for thought.
With that in mind, I turned to look at the new apostolic exhortation of our Holy Father, appropriately titled Evangelii Gaudium. I hope you have had the chance to read it, rather than reading about it in the various blogs and so-called commentaries that have been springing up left and right (mostly right, I might add; Sara and Rush don’t care for the Holy Father’s words). The document is fascinating for its theological balance. The pope’s insights are startling. What does he say? One of the first gems that the pope offers is an insight: we live in a Church, divinely created but also made up of humans, that is, we live in an incarnational Church.
The pope points to the difference between theological truth and the means in which it is expressed. He notes: “Today’s vast and rapid cultural changes demand that we constantly seek ways of expressing the unchanging truths in a language which brings out their abiding newness.” The interesting point here is the quality of “abiding newness” found in the Church’s unchangeable truths. There is always a newness, a freshness, to the message of the Gospel, perhaps even more so for those who are hearing for the thousandth time than for those hearing it new. The Gospel is not something that we have; it is something that is unfolding for us even as we announce it to the nations.
One way in which this internal evangelization is hampered is through our internal warfare. The pope makes this non-rhetorical statement: “How many wars take place within the people of God and in our different communities!?” We are torn by divisions within and we know what these divisions are. Some are too lib, some are more conservative than God (we can’t say the pope anymore). Some are too this or that. Frequently, our understandings of the Church are understandings that exclude others rather than welcome them.
Even within the Catholic Church, individuals have become magisteriums; individuals have become authoritative voices. The pope, asks Christians “in communities throughout the world to offer a radiant and attractive witness of fraternal communion.” We must inspire one another, encourage one another, assist one another, instead of judging one another, criticizing one another, harping on one another. The pope points out that dialogue is not only about the communication of a truth; it is the truth in its method, because dialogue requires the active participation of all parties.
“It arises from the enjoyment of speaking and it enriches those who express their love for one another through the medium of worlds. “In a culture paradoxically suffering from anonymity and at the same time obsessed with the details of other people’s lives, shamelessly given over to morbid curiosity, the Church must look more closely and sympathetically at others whenever necessary.”The pope calls the Church’s ministers not to judgment, but to “make present the fragrance of Christ’s closeness and his personal gaze”Who does not seek this?
The pope calls for many ways in which this newness of expression is realized. It is made manifest in our common social acceptance of the Good News. It is realized in our inclusion of the poor in the social ideal. The pope notes that if we hear the Gospel, it is a Gospel for the poor; in union with God, we hear a plea. Poverty, however, can be understood in many ways.
Going back to Rebuilt for a moment, the most impoverished places may be those where the metallic clink of the coin is heard readily, but the Spirit is denied access because of personal preferences and ideals holding sway.The pope speaks of a renewal of the ideal of the common good, something ironically lost in a globalized cultural environment. The pope also sees this social dialogue as the authentic contributor to peace in the world, to the renewal of authentic dialogues between religion and science, ecumenical and interfaith relations and ideals of religious freedom.All of this comes with a cost and the Holy Father names that cost, triumphantly: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
The pope is offering us something quite unique: he is offering us an out. From what do we need an out? Again, you and I have rehearsed these themes many times. We have rehearsed them even if we have not yet performed the drama. We live in a Church in which we have the strongest expression of cultural involvement in the history of the world, and yet our parishes, our schools and our lives are culturally dead. We live in a Church that has consistently been involved in the betterment of humanity through education and yet our school children and adults remain ignorant of the basic principles of faith.
We live in a Church that has consistently been an advocate of the marginalized and a champion of the politically oppressed and we are turning into an unwelcoming Church of the millions of new immigrants and wayfarers. We live in a Church that has assisted the poor in every turn and we are becoming a place of closed communities that push the needy into the background. We have become brothers and sisters, a Church that has held fast to its teachings in the face of incredible social pressures and yet today our stance on abortion, on birth control, on capital punishment and dozens of other issues is unrecognizably different from our secular neighbors.
What are most of these problems but problems of imagination?
We cannot imagine a world in which the poor and the needy are brought into communion with the ever-present others.
And so we continue to fall into the cultural and political biases of our own place and time, which contradict the values of the Gospel we are supposed to uphold.
We cannot imagine a world in which this group and that group find a common mechanism, like communion, for gaining access to the other’s insulated vision of life.
And so we take some smug comfort in our isolation from the rest of preening humanity in ivory towers of academia, or wealth, or a misguided orthodoxy.
We cannot imagine a world in which truth is triumphant.
And so we continue to perpetuate lies about our social environment, our neighbors and ourselves. We lie to ourselves about ourselves because we cannot imagine something different, something alive rather than dead, something open rather than closed, something meaningful rather than mundane.
Somehow we need to be rebuilt.
We are quite adept at employing business models and self-help models. I want to propose another model for renewal in the Church, one I think might fit the Holy Father’s sense of mission very well: the poetic model.
I have been reading a great deal lately. I have obviously been looking at writers like Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor and Robert Hugh Benson. I have also been investigating several works related to priestly life; after all, that is my job. However, I recently read a novel by a fellow named Richard Mason. I had earlier read a couple of other novels by him including his debut novel, written while he was an undergraduate at Oxford, and I can tell you that was absolutely the novel’s claim to fame.
I am not a particular fan of Richard Mason, but when this new novel popped up on Amazon Recommends I was intrigued, not by the content but by the cover. Sometimes I do judge a book by its cover. On the cover of this novel titled History of a Pleasure Seeker, there was a reproduction of a painting by the surrealist artist Rene Magritte. I knew this painting very well and frankly I took another chance on Richard Mason because of the painting, which is titled “The Reproduction Interrupted.”
Now bear with me a minute. The painting shows a well-dressed man looking in a mirror, but instead of seeing his reflection in the mirror, he sees something else; he sees what we see, that is, his back. He cannot, and we cannot, see his face. The reproduction in the mirror is interrupted by something, in this case Magritte’s commentary on the way in which people are viewed by the social order, and perhaps more significantly, the way in which they come to view themselves, see their reflections only through the social order. In other words, we come to believe the lie that society tells about us.
With Magritte on the cover, I tried to read the book. It is about a man named Piet Barol. He has many adventures. He has many schemes and plans. He has many, many opinions, but in the long run, we are left with a kind of longing, which I hope that Richard Mason intends. In the long run, we must summarize Piet with the rather damning opinion of Gertrude Stein about the city of Oakland, California: “There is no there there.” And isn’t that where we are? Isn’t that our common destination? Mason has captured well a distillation of modern culture in the idolatry of self-deception through self-aggrandizement.
That opinion could not be held about the Catholic writer I want to consider today. Gerard Manley Hopkins was, like Tolkien and Benson, born into a prominent Anglican family. Born in 1844, he converted to Catholicism as a college undergraduate and was received into the Church by Blessed John Henry Newman. He then pursued a vocation in the Society of Jesus, being ordained a priest in 1877. He then went on to teach classics in Dublin, where he died at the age of 44.
Overall, there was little that was remarkable about his life except, of course, his poems. His contribution to poetry came in his use of what is called sprung rhythm, that is, the use of meter that is based on syllabic repetition and words that begin with the same sounds. Some call him the father of modern poetry. Perhaps he is. I know his poetry inspires.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
In its complexity, it gives us something. It gives us confusion perhaps, but also some strange kind of hope. Is that not the same thing as faith? Is faith perhaps sprung rhyme, something poetic? As a poet, Hopkins spent a great deal of time stirring the existential pot to confuse and arouse in confusion. We spend a great deal of time trying to keep the pot from boiling, but we find instead a confusion in not having a boiling pot called life.
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
Poetry captures the essence of life not in the pot, or what is boiling in the pot, but in the very act of boiling. Poetry is action, first an action of the mind and then an action of the body and soul. Poetry moves us necessarily. Shouldn’t faith do the same?
Hopkins writes:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Praise Him, indeed. Isn’t this really what the pope is asking us in his apostolic exhortation when he calls us to the “spiritual savor of being a people”? Not of being a person, but being a people. The secret to poetry is that its essence is communicative, not secret, not gnostic, not strange, but inviting, stimulating, calling for an interpretive element in us that is the best of us, the most human of us, the most communion-oriented of us. I think that Hopkins would certainly agree with the pope in their mutual consideration of love:
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
Like the pope today, Hopkins considered in his own day the value of:
What would the world be, once bereft
Weeds and wilderness confront our love of wildness and wet because,
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
“All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.”
Spoken like a true Jesuit. Francis is certainly akin to his fellow Society member when Francis writes:
We are not asked to be flawless, but to keep growing and wanting to grow as we advance along the path of the Gospel; our arms must never grow slack. What is essential is that the preacher be certain that God loves him, that Jesus Christ has saved him and that his love has always the last word. Encountering such beauty, he will often feel that his life does not glorify God as it should, and he will sincerely desire to respond more fully to so great a love.
What is the new evangelization? Let’s cut to the chase. How do we approach salvation?
We are dealt a certain hand of cards, the social order, the conditions into which we are born.
What is this age? If we are true to ourselves, we recognize it for what it is: hypocritical. It claims to be the age of information, yet people are stupid. It claims to be the age of equality and economic parity, yet people are suffering. It claims to be the age of enlightenment, and yet we struggle in the darkness of sin. It claims to offer us everything and it offers nothing, nothing at all.
I was intrigued by a story on the BBC the other day about Facebook. It seems that people are not allowed to post anything sexually explicit on Facebook. Well, thanks be to God. Yet there was a video posted on Facebook of a beheading. This was allowed to stay on because it was “instructive.” Instructive for whom? What a mess. We are Facebooking and tweeting ourselves to death. And yet the pieces of a culture are still here. Art, music, poetry, literature, architecture, philosophy, the sciences, knowledge, all of the bulwarks of culture are still here and yet they are gathering dust, growing fallow in the untilled soil of our lack of curiosity. What is needed?
Our tendency, even here, is to see what we need to give up in order to realize the Christian vision. We barter. I like this or that. But I can give it up.I like to do this. But I can give that up.I engage in these activities. But that is something I can give up. Thus salvation comes through learning what I need to give up and what I might hold on to in order to attract God.
But how does it work out?There is always something that we cannot give up. Our secret.Our little preciouses.Our dully prosaic lives. There is nothing so dull and prosaic as sin. We have a lot of people departing for hell from bare rooms.The Christian life is predicated on one thing: total, absolute dependence upon God.Then we move from prose to poetry.
What do we realize?
How do we learn about pied beauty? We learn through the world, but not of the world:
Glory be to God for dappled things--
And that is praise, not of the select kind but of the giving-up kind. The ordinary kind.
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
“To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.”
“All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.”
